Inside Innovation - hue

February 13, 2014

Manage your projects with MyProjects

Use MyProjects to create, save manage and share items and projects with you colleagues and team members.

Forget having just one light bulb moment. The team behind Philips hue had dozens on their journey to creating one of the company’s most talked about recent innovations. Developing the smart connected lighting system that allows people play with tone, brightness and color to create any mood they can think of took determination and lateral thinking, as well as crucial insights from some key partners. Today, hue continues to evolve and improve thanks to the team’s bold decision to allow programming enthusiasts to dream up new apps of their own. It’s hard to imagine that it all started with one man’s side project and a simple app.

“I wondered what would happen if I took the lamp, which uses a static color wheel on its remote control, and made a much more dynamic display on a smartphone.”
Pei-Yin Chao, Interaction Designer at Philips

“The world has been talking about the idea of a connected home for a while, but this is it. The more partners we work with the better, so we can start making the connected home a reality for more people.”
George Yianni, Technology Specialist at Philips Lighting

“Just because we can connect lights to the internet, why would we? The answer – and the essence of hue – is personalization. It gives people control and allows them to find the best use on their own.”

“With a system like this, which is so new and disruptive – so quite unfamiliar to people – we needed to give it a great personality.”